In 1914, the young Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen arrived in British East Africa, where she would spend the next seventeen years of her life. Suddenly an immense world — much vaster, more beautiful, and more complex than she could ever have imagined — presented itself before her, revealing ever-new perspectives. The landscape left an indelible mark on her imagination and would later inspire her memoir Out of Africa.
For Blixen, Africa was far more than a setting. It was a place of freedom, beauty and transformation. Amid periods of hardship, loss and solitude, the natural world became a source of wonder, consolation and meaning. Long after she was forced to leave Africa and return to Denmark in 1931, the memory of the landscape remained vividly alive within her, nourishing both her inner life and her writing.
The Dreams of Lioness Blixen grew from a desire to revisit the landscapes that shaped one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive literary voices. Created during several journeys through Kenya and Tanzania, the series draws upon passages from Blixen’s writings and reflects on the enduring relationship between memory, place and imagination.
The photographs seek to evoke the world that continued to inhabit Blixen’s dreams long after she left Africa — a visual conversation across time between writer and photographer, memory and landscape, dream and reality.
The series explores the capacity of landscape not only to inspire us, but to sustain us and transform us.
“The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn-trees.”
Karen Blixen, Out of Africa